On the cement floor were ranged a number of objects which, like the chair, seemed to be of astonishing value and entirely out of place.
Jars and vessels of massive gold were set about at hazard. Close to Colin there stood a great lidless chest or box. Its apparent value would have capitalized a bank, but into it there had been tumbled a heap of shabby, common things--some dirt-encrusted overalls, an old pair of canvas trousers, and the like. A steel spade had been flung in among them so carelessly that its blade had chipped off a long, curling flake of gold.
Three solid gold cougars supporting a six-foot basin, like a baptismal font, were impressive, but a stained rubber apron draped over one cougar's head rather, spoiled the effect.
The only thing here which Colin considered absolutely and completely appropriate was the squat, polished, black statue that crouched on a small dais beneath a canopy of black, with five candles burning on either side of it set on the prongs of two golden candelabra.
No evil could be too vile for that ugliest of images to grin at.
The head--particularly the mouth--might have been compared to a humanized toad, save that a toad, for all its lack of pulchritude, has a certain honesty of expression. The sculptor of that image had not stopped at frank ugliness. Alert stealth was in the very distention of its nostrils. The eyes were slits, but they were watchful slits. The mouth grinned, but it was a tense, cruel grin that had never heard of humor.
With long, treacherous fingers clasped around its knees, the thing squatted, naked, having none of those adornments with which religion, barbarous or otherwise, symbolizes the attributes of its deity. The being represented had but one purpose and one end, and of that the face alone was an adequate symbol.
As Colin looked he felt rise up in him such a wave of loathing and detestation as turned him sick.
"Reed," said he, "I could forgive you the imps of your quagmire there, and I could forgive you the vile bloodsucker you loosed on me at the gate, but the sight of that black iniquity you no doubt worship I'll not forgive you! Faith, it'll haunt my dreams if I live to be a hundred!"
Again Reed flashed into resentment.
"No more of that!" he snarled. "I worship nothing! Do you understand me? Nothing! Good God! Are you such a blind fool that you fear a chunk of carved marble more than me? I am the lord of fear--not Nacoc-Yaotl!"
"Who did you say?"
A word, a name is at the least, when you stop to think of it, a potential force. At best and strongest it may have the power of magic. For Colin the years dropped away like a falling screen. Afloat on a sea of light, he raised his eyes to a dark cliff crowned by a monstrous building--blind, pallid, oppressive in its mere appearance.
"It is the seat of Nacoc-Yaotl," said a girl's voice. "Nacoc-Yaotl, maker of hatreds, who would destroy mankind if he could!"
"Nacoc-Yaotl!" Reed's impatient voice reached Colin through time and dragged him back to the present. "One phase of an old Aztec god. Lord! You look stupid when you gape like that! The years have certainly brought you no increase of intelligence--Friend Boots!"
Colin's mouth shut with a snap.
"Archer Kennedy!" he ejaculated. "It was the beard and the glasses that did it! That and thinking you a dead man long ago. You can tell me then what I've been wondering about for fifteen years, more or less! Was Tlapallan a real city, or did I dream it?"
* * * * *
It is very tiresome, when one is trying to impress a man with the horror of one's malicious power, to be regarded as a mere purveyor of information. To Archer Kennedy the distinctly impersonal nature of Colin's first question was irritating to the point of insult.
In the days of their earlier acquaintance, his chief grievance against the Irish lad had been a trick he had of ignoring him as a personality. As Chester Reed, man of mystery, Colin had given promise of at least according him the respect of hatred. Identified as Kennedy, that old manner had instantly returned. A pin-prick, of course, but this man's nature was not only malicious. Its malice was of the shallow type that resents pin-pricks more than blows.
"Tlapallan," he said between his teeth, "was real once, but it's nothing now! Do you know who destroyed it?"
"Nacoc-Yaotl?" inquired Colin, with deep interest.
Rather to his amazement, the reply was a heavy blow across the mouth.
"You utter dolt!" raged Kennedy. "Mention Nacoc-Yaotl again and I'll have you dragged to the middle of that swamp and left there bound for my servants to devour! I caused the ruin of Tlapallan--and I drained it first of a knowledge that makes me your master, as it will make me master of the world in my day of triumph!"
Colin said nothing. The man who had struck him he remembered as too insignificant and absurd even to be seriously angry with. As for the grandiloquent claim he made, Colin took no stock in it.
But Nacoc-Yaotl was another matter.
From the haunting glare of the goblin creatures he looked to the slit-eyed watchfulness of that more terrible though seemingly inanimate demon, and he knew that this business was between him and them.
What was it Biornson had said before he turned him out to die, as he thought, in the desert? "To prevent a possible thing that I dare not speak of, I would condemn myself as readily as you. For I know that Nacoc-Yaotl grows restive --"
Was this what he had meant? Had the evil power that laired in that pallid, enormous building above the lake desired a freedom greater than Tlapallan allowed? And had it achieved that desire?
"There is a prophecy," the Moth-Girl had said, "that some day Nacoc-Yaotl will destroy Tlapallan, but I do not believe it. Quetzalcoatl, noblest of all the gods, is stronger than he."
But the city that swam in a lake of light was no more. He himself had beheld the dark tarn that filled the hollow of the hills it had glorified. And Quetzalcoatl--the rival god--the image he had brought thence--twice broken, and the third time utterly shattered through invasions which he now certainly knew to have emanated from this house --
Colin's imagination was racing now. It produced a dozen half-lost memories and flung them together in a most appalling pattern.
And back of all the horror a joy was hiding--a joy that in the flying confusion of his thoughts he could not at first identify.
Then suddenly the pattern was set. Everything fell into order, and, seated, as he believed, between the devil and his fiend-eyed offspring, Colin caught the greatest joy of his life and knew the most rapturous relief.
His Dusk Lady was not mad!
Were anyone crazy, it was himself for so believing her! The strange, elfin look of her beauty; the low, musical voice that was as if a thrush should speak; the fine, level courage of her, to be disconcerted neither by her own danger nor the killing of a man she loathed!
Only one girl he had met in his life had shared those qualities, and though to Colin the Moth-Girl had been a pretty dream where the Dusk Lady was an all-engrossing reality, the race-resemblance was strong enough for him to have placed and understood her--had he not been such an utter and prejudiced fool!
She was a child of Tlapallan, and though he doubted if her race were entirely human, that was a matter of no consequence. Hadn't an ancestor of his married an elf woman that he met on the Bri Leith itself? And hadn't she been a good wife to him, and his own, Colin's, great-grandmother on his mother's side --
Suddenly Colin realized that Kennedy was speaking had been speaking, in fact, for some time.
CHAPTER XXIV
A Lonely Traveler
Table of Contents
Across the rough ground of an empty field two miles beyond Undine, a dark figure stumbled and panted beneath the unheeding stars. Once or twice it fell among the hard rows of old, dry corn stubble. One might have thought it some strayed child, lost in the night, but the figure was too tall, too slimly graceful beneath its flowing outer garment of black.
It was a weary, courageous figure, that had come far, far, and all the way on foot. For the bright galleys of Tlapallan were the only means of tr
avel that slim figure knew till its time of grief, and in the one long, terrible journey across the outer world it had learned little, by reason of being kept close by enemies.
But to Tlapallan's children were certain birthrights. No homing pigeon could have come more sure and true than that slim, tired one that stumbled among the stubble-rows.
The night was not so still as it had been. A wind was rising. It blew in sudden gusts, like the breath of an invisible giant. The long cloak flapped and struggled, wrapping hinderingly about the wearer's limbs.
Away to one side blazed the lights of the chateaulike "farmhouse" of whose acres the stubble-field was a part. The house was full of flowers, lights, and laughing people, for its owners were entertaining many guests that night.
But the cloaked one was no guest of theirs. In a desperation of thwarted haste it stumbled on, as indifferent to the gay, human throng in the distant house as the stars were indifferent to itself.
CHAPTER XXV
The White Beast-Hand
Table of Contents
"And so," Kennedy was saying, "being mad for the girl, and having learned that my brains were worthy of respect, Marco, or rather Marcazuma, to give him his full name, sold me one or two secrets that were absolutely invaluable. Just for my help in winning her! Lord! If I could have got a like hold on some priests of the other gilds the world would be at my feet now, as it shall be yet! Believe me, friend Boots, the most powerful god in Tlapallan never had a seat there, nor received any recognition. Even I was blinded for a while."
O'Hara decided that his abstraction had lost the thread of a very interesting narrative.
"I don't understand," he said.
"Neither did I--at first. Do you remember in what agony of mind I called you to come back that night when they turned you loose and kept me a prisoner? I had seen a thing that would have made any man afraid. I had seen the transmutation--but I'll get to that, later. Believe me, you'll have a very clear idea of that particular 'mystery' before this night ends!
"But to get back, there was quite a while there when I was actually afraid--afraid of their trumpery stone and gold images! I! Then old Topiltzen--you remember Topiltzen? He was first priest of the sacrifice to that lump of stone there"--he nodded contemptuously toward the eidolon of Nacoc-Yaotl--"he was the one you dropped overboard and I nearly paid the debt--with not my life, but a fate that, as I hinted before, you will be well able to understand before I'm done with you."
There was an ugly and reiterated threat in the man's words, but somehow Colin found it unimpressive. That vile, unnatural marsh, with its obscene forms and spectral eyes, was terrible enough. The squatting similitude of all evil beneath the black canopy was--like the things a man sees in the dark light of delirium.
But the self-styled "Lord of Fear" himself was not terrible at all. He was as incongruous to his surroundings as the soiled rubber apron to the golden cougar's head, or the miscellany of common trash to the golden chest that contained it.
The black god of the dais, the goblins of the swamp, were loathsome but awful. Kennedy was loathsome, and inspired contempt. He was shallow, cheap, the shell of a man, empty of aught but petty egotism and a malice that had not even the redeeming dignity of greatness.
Looking him in the eyes, Colin wondered that he had a little while before seemed to see behind those round lenses the true fiend-look that characterized the marsh beasts.
"I wish," he said steadily, "if it's all the same to you, Mr. Kennedy, that you'd give me the straight story and be through."
"You do, eh? If you knew what waits for you at the end of it--Well, to go on, old Topiltzen received a 'revelation' in a dream that his god wished me for a temple servant. Darned fortunate revelation for me, too. I told you that I let imagination run away with me at first. I swept and carried and toiled for them in fear and trembling! I! Till I began to use my reason, to remember that material effects have material causes, and I saw clear to the real god behind the sham ones."
"And yet you'd not strike me as a religious man this minute," observed his captive thoughtfully.
"You fool, I don't mean what you mean! The god I speak of is the only one of real power the world has ever known. I mean--science! Those priests had a dozen secrets they took from science and gave the credit to Tonathiu, and Tlaloc, and Quetzalcoatl, and Lord knows what all. And in the end they paid the penalty of all fools who cloud science with superstition and have faith in their own empty rituals.
"They, who might have ruled the world, turned on each other. In the terrific collision of blind forces loosed, they and their misused knowledge and Tlapallan itself simply vanished from the earth.
"Ha! I helped to bring that about--I--the poor, despised, insignificant temple slave! Like all proud, superstitious fools, they were ready enough to believe the tales I carried from one to another.
"Svend Biornson rather fancied himself in those days. High adviser to the Council of Gilds! He scorned me. Once he called me an 'abject, cowardly slave' to my face, but it was the slave who undermined Svend Biornson's work, and the slave who caused Tlapallan's fall! And those hulking guardians! Neutral by oath! God, but they were bitter against each other before I had finished!"
"A desirable citizen they got when they got you!"
But Kennedy, caught in the rush of his own triumphal memories, went on.
"Of course, luck was with me, or I'd have brought nothing out of the grand smash but myself and some pleasant memories. Marcazuma--he was an under-priest of Nacoc-Yaotl--is one yet, in fact --"
"What? Marco?"
"I call him that, yes. The other's too long for convenience and too odd. We haven't been anxious to make people ask questions of any sort. Even you can understand that. But Marcazuma he is, and still a priest of Nacoc-Yaotl--in his own silly opinion."
Colin had cause to doubt it, but if Kennedy had not discovered the albino's demise, there seemed no good reason to enlighten him,
"As I was saying, Marcazuma had already got in pretty deep with me. Then he was kind enough to have a revelation of his own--or say he had one--in which his black ugliness there expressed a desire to escape into a wider field of activity, and named me as his chosen agent."
"H-m! And maybe the Creator of Hatreds wasn't off in his choice of an agent at that, Mr. Kennedy."
"Will you shut up, or do you prefer to be gagged? You're wise, for once. Be silent and listen! While they were fighting on the lake, Marco and a few of his fellows, who believed in his silly revelation, helped move his godship and this temple paraphernalia that you see out of the hills, and afterward lugged them to civilization for me. And then they were fools enough to go back to that cataclysmic hell we'd left raging behind us--all but Marco. He is a coward as well as a fool, and besides, there was the girl."
"What?"
"The girl. Why do you look--ah, you did see her that night, didn't you--and lied about it afterward?"
"D'ye mean to tell me that you--that Marco --"
"Oh, forget the girl! She's not important. I brought her along for the same reason that I brought his black ugliness yonder. Marcazuma has been in love with her since she was a mere child. But the poor fellow is no beauty himself, and her father would never hear of a match between them. She has always sworn she'd kill herself if I gave her to Marco, but that doesn't seem to faze his devotion a particle.
"Queer! I wouldn't step out of my road for all the dark-eyed beauties that ever walked, but Marco is a cowardly, weak simpleton of a man. I've never let him have her for just that reason. Afraid she would kill herself, and Marco would follow suit, and until recently I've' needed the fool.
"He believes that Nacoc-Yaotl has deigned in a measure to carnify himself in me. Between desire for the girl and fear of the black god he fancies is in me, I have owned the man body and soul, and in no other way could I have owned him so completely. To tell you the truth, I rather suspect that the young lady has overcome her distaste for his society and persuaded him to take her away from here.
<
br /> "I was out last night--tell you about that later--and when I came back they had both disappeared. But it's no particular matter. They are such a queer pair that no one would believe any story they could tell, and Marco, at least, has enough sense to know better than tell tales on me. Let 'em go. I don't need either of them, any more than I need the statue there. I'd have that carted out and broken up tomorrow, only, to tell you the truth, I've a certain affection for the silly thing. Rather a pretty little parlor ornament, isn't it?" he chuckled.
"Well, to return to my story, luck was with me from the start. I tell you, though superstition was Bonaparte's one weakness, I can almost sympathize with the little Corsican's belief in his star of destiny. If there had been a real star of destiny working for me things could have been made no easier.
"You would think that shipping all that gold out of Mexico, particularly in the form it bears, would have been a hard enough trick to put over. The government would have grabbed the whole loot at the first suspicion of what I was taking out. It isn't worth my while to tell you the full history of that trip. But it fairly, ran on greased rails from start to finish.
"We ended with a run across the Gulf to New Orleans in a schooner that must have been plastered with pure luck; I don't know of anything else that could have held her rotten old timbers together. Her skipper knew me in other days. Helped me out for the sake of old times--and one of the gold ingots Marco had looted from the temple supply of raw material. I rather expected a knife in the back, but Diego Rosalis must have become quite a reformed character in the years I spent in Tlapallan.
"He told me he had never seen so easy a run as we made, nor one he was so glad to see the end of. Complained of frightful dreams through the entire voyage, and stuck on deck without sleeping all the last forty-eight hours. I asked him why, and all I could get out of him was: Tengo miedo--tengo miedo malo!' But what he was 'badly afraid' of, unless it was the dyspepsia that gave him the dreams, is a mystery to me yet. If any one had reason to be afraid it was I. That old rip of a schooner, with her leaky hold full of my gold, and the original sixteen pirates of the 'sixteen men on the dead man's chest' song for a crew!
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